Not exactly bliss, but…
At the beginning of March, 2017 I’d
gone a full four months without reading any news.
I’ve discovered ignorance is easy; a little more of it and I
might become a Republican. By default, not by choice of course.
My biggest problem has been the technology sites. For some
reason, they can’t seem to let the political stuff alone. For example, the fact
that Dumb Donald uses twitter seems to be reason enough to report on his
electronic drool.
Fortunately, though, I don’t have much context anymore so don’t find myself thinking a lot about the little bits of news I get from the tech websites. That’s a good thing and it has proven to be helpful in making me more productive. I’ve just finished the first draft of a book that took a lot of investigation and reading. I’d likely have been a few months behind in getting to this point if my shower-thinking time had been used for politics instead of prose.
And, despite my wife’s fears, we still have plenty to talk
about at dinner, while driving, etc.
I haven’t yet done the switch from foreign language news to novels
– too time consuming while the book was being researched – so I’ve fallen
behind linguistically. Not good since I wasn’t all that solid in some -- I fear
I’ve lost most of my progress in Bulgarian. I’ll restart soon. In the meantime,
I’ve found that the mobile phone app, Quizlet, is great for practicing
vocabulary. It’s kept my Spanish from falling too far back and is likely
helping to improve my French where the big problem is vocabulary.
